Chapter 4
Beckett
We got married on a Thursday morning at the county courthouse, with Judge Fenton officiating and Eli as the world's smallest and least cooperative ring bearer.
I'd worn a clean shirt. That was the extent of my preparation, clothing-wise — a shirt with a collar, ironed, which I'd done myself badly at six that morning, and which Briar took one look at and re-ironed in the courthouse bathroom while telling me I was "hopeless and she loved me."
Mari wore a yellow dress. I'd never seen her in a dress.
I'd seen her in scrubs and in jeans and once, memorably, in fox pajamas, but never in a dress, and when she walked into that courtroom with the spring light coming through the high windows and that yellow dress and her hair down, I forgot, briefly, every word I'd ever known.
This was supposed to be paperwork. I want that on the record. We'd negotiated it at a kitchen table. Separate rooms. No expectations. A practical arrangement between two drowning people.
And then she walked in wearing yellow and smiling that smile that fills rooms, and my heart did something completely outside the terms of our agreement, and I had to look at my boots for a second and remind myself what was real.
"You clean up nice, Holloway," she said, stopping in front of me.
"You too," I said, which was the understatement of my entire life, and which made her laugh, and the laugh helped, the laugh put the ground back under me.
Eli had one job. He was to carry the rings down the aisle on a little pillow Wren had made.
He understood the assignment for approximately four seconds before deciding the rings were more interesting in his mouth, and then deciding the pillow was a hat, and then deciding to lie down in the middle of the courtroom and discuss the situation.
"Eli, bud, bring the rings."
"I'm a turtle," Eli explained, from the floor, on his back. "Turtles go slow."
The entire Iron Thorn, packed into that little courtroom, lost it. Knox actually put his face in his hand. Judge Fenton, who'd done a thousand of these, said he'd never had a turtle before and would allow it.
Mari crouched down in her yellow dress, completely unbothered, and said, "Sir Turtle. We require the rings for the ceremony. It's a knightly quest."
Eli sat bolt upright. "A QUEST."
"A quest. Very important. Only the bravest turtle can do it."
He delivered the rings. He delivered them at a sprint, the quest having apparently overridden the turtle.
He handed them to me and announced, "I did the quest," and the whole room applauded, and that's how I got married — to laughter, to my boy taking a bow, to a woman in yellow grinning at me like we were getting away with something.
We were, I suppose. We just didn't know yet what.
Judge Fenton ran through the words. I said mine.
Mari said hers. There's a part where you're supposed to mean it, and I'd told myself we'd both be acting through that part, and then I got to it — to have and to hold — and I looked at her and I could not, for the life of me, make my voice do anything but mean it.
She heard it. Her eyes went wide, just a flicker. And then she said her part back, and I'd have sworn on Eli's life that she meant it too, but we'd signed a paper that said we didn't, so we both pretended.
I kissed her because you're supposed to. Quick. Careful. Her mouth was soft and warm and tasted like the coffee she'd had that morning, and it lasted maybe two seconds, and I thought about it for two weeks.
"You may now," Judge Fenton said, "go be a family."
"We have a DOG now?" Eli asked hopefully, having misheard, and that was the second time the courtroom came apart.
We didn't have a dog yet.
That came later.
She moved into the cabin that weekend.
I'd cleared out the office. Spent a whole Saturday hauling junk to the shed — old gear, fly-tying stuff, three years of things I'd shoved in a room and shut the door on.
I put a real bed in there. Hung curtains, the ones Wren picked because I had no idea what curtains were supposed to do or be. Made it nice. Made it hers.
And then she arrived with her plants and her boxes and her secondhand couch — we kept hers, mine was "an offense against furniture," she said — and within about forty-eight hours it became extremely clear that no amount of cleared-out office was going to handle the actual problem, which was that the cabin was small and there was only one bathroom and a three-year-old does not understand the concept of separate rooms.
The first morning, I woke up at dawn the way I always do, and there was a weight on my chest. I opened my eyes. Eli. Asleep, drooling, sideways, having migrated into my bed at some point in the night like he does. Fine. Normal.
What wasn't normal was the second weight against my other side.
Mari.
Eli had apparently gone to her room first, found it occupied by a new mom-shaped person, been delighted by this development, and herded us both into the big bed sometime around four.
And now there we were, the three of us, in the gray morning light, Eli a starfish in the middle, Mari asleep on the far edge with her hair across the pillow and one hand tucked under her cheek, and me, wide awake, staring at the ceiling, feeling something so enormous and so forbidden that I didn't dare move in case it broke.
Separate rooms. No expectations.
It lasted one night. The terms lasted exactly one night, and it wasn't even either of us who broke them, it was a three-year-old with no respect for contracts.
I got up before either of them woke. Carefully.
Slid out, tucked the blanket back, stood in the doorway a second looking at the two of them — my nephew and my wife-on-paper, breathing soft in the early light — and then I went outside and split wood I did not need, in the cold spring morning, until my shoulders burned and my head was quiet.
That became a pattern. The woodpile got very large.
But here's what I didn't expect, what nobody warns you about when you marry someone for paperwork: the small things get you. It's not the big stuff. It's the small stuff that gets in under your guard.
She hums. Did I know that? I didn't know that.
She hums while she cooks, no particular tune, just this low happy sound, and the first time I heard it I stopped in the hallway because the cabin had never made that sound before, in three years, in thirty years, my whole life that cabin and the one before it had been a place where nobody hummed, and now somebody did.
She leaves sticky notes. Beckett — Eli's clinic at 2, don't forget the dinosaur cup.
Beckett — we're out of milk, I'll grab it.
Beckett — you're doing great, by the way, in case nobody said it today.
That last one I found stuck to the coffee maker on a hard morning, and I didn't tell her I kept it, folded up, in the drawer of my nightstand, where I keep the two things I have left of Cora.
She fills the quiet. Not with noise — she's not loud — but with life. The cabin had been too quiet for three years and I'd thought that was just how it was, the price of the life I had, and then she moved in and the quiet went away and I realized I'd been starving for sound and never knew it.
And she found out things about me too. I caught her watching me one night, reading Eli his dinosaur book, doing the voices — I do all the voices, badly, the T-rex sounds like a sad foghorn and the triceratops is inexplicably Australian, I don't know why, it just happened once and Eli demands it now — and I looked up and Mari was standing in the doorway with the strangest look on her face.
"What," I said.
"Nothing." She shook her head. "You're just — you're a really good father, Beckett. I keep — I keep waiting to find the part where you're not, the part you keep telling me about, the failing part. And it's not there. It's just not there."
I didn't know what to do with that, so I went back to the book and made the T-rex extra sad, and Eli laughed, and Mari watched, and the cabin was warm.
We built routines without meaning to. I made breakfast — I'd gotten good at breakfast, three years of practice.
She did bedtime stories — better than me, fewer foghorns, more drama.
We tag-teamed the relentless engine of Eli's energy, one of us tapping out when the other tapped in, this wordless rhythm we fell into within a week like we'd been doing it for years.
It felt like a family.
That was the problem. It felt, unsettlingly, exactly like a real family, and I'd signed a piece of paper that said it wasn't one, and every day the paper felt more like a lie I'd told myself and less like a contract I could keep.
The night that did it was the nightmare.
Eli had a bad one — woke up screaming around midnight, the kind of crying that's not quite awake, where they're scared of something they can't name and you can't fix.
I had him in my arms in the hallway, walking him, doing the low voice, the spooked-horse voice, and Mari came out of her room in an oversized t-shirt with her hair a mess and said, "What can I do," and I said, "Nothing, I've got him, go back to sleep," and she didn't go back to sleep.
She made cocoa. She sat with us on the couch at midnight while a three-year-old cried himself calm, and she rubbed his back, and she told him a story about a brave knight and a sleepy dragon, and he settled.
And then we were all too tired to move, and somehow all three of us ended up in the big bed, Eli between us, lights out, the cabin dark and the tree frogs going outside.
"Thank you," I said into the dark.
"For cocoa? It's instant. You're easy to impress."
"For all of it."
She was quiet a second. Then her hand found mine, over the top of Eli's small sleeping body, just for a moment, just a squeeze.
"You don't have to thank me," she said softly. "I'm here. I want to be here. That's the whole point."
She fell asleep first, her hand still loosely near mine, Eli's fist wrapped around my finger the way it's been since the hospital.
And I lay awake.
All night. Wide awake, in the dark, with my nephew and my wife breathing soft beside me, feeling a thing I had absolutely no right to feel and feeling it anyway, feeling it so hard my chest ached with it.
I loved her.
There it was. Out of the box. I'd married her for paperwork and I'd told myself I had nothing to offer and I'd cleared out an office and built a separate room, and none of it had worked, because somewhere in the humming and the sticky notes and the cocoa at midnight I'd fallen the rest of the way in love with Marisol Vega, and I'd signed a paper that said I wasn't allowed to.
I got up before dawn.
I went outside. The morning was cold and gray and the woodpile was already enormous, a monument to everything I wasn't letting myself feel, and I picked up the axe anyway, and I split wood I would never burn in a hundred winters, trying to outwork a longing I'd agreed in writing not to have.
I split wood until the sun came up. Until my arms shook. Until the back door opened and Mari stood there in the doorway with two cups of coffee, watching me, her head tilted, and she didn't ask why a man would be splitting wood at dawn in spring when the woodpile already reached the eaves.
She just held out a cup.
"Come inside," she said. "It's cold. And Eli's asking for you. He wants to know if it's carrots day."
I set down the axe.
"It's not carrots day," I said. "It's Sunday."
"I'll tell him." She handed me the coffee, and her fingers brushed mine, and there was that current again, that current from the kitchen table, and I saw her notice it, and for one second we just stood there in the cold spring morning, two people who'd promised each other separate rooms, holding two cups of coffee, not moving.
"Beckett," she said.
"Yeah."
"...Nothing." She turned and went inside. "Come on. Coffee's getting cold and so are you."
I followed her in.
The wood would still be there tomorrow.
So, I was starting to understand, would this.